Our Vital, Vulnerable Coasts

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Waves crashing against a seawall in Jensen Beach, Fla., on Saturday.CreditJason Henry for The New York Times

By Danny Heitman

Sept. 12, 2017

Baton Rouge, La. — Three months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged my home state of Louisiana in 2005, my wife and I took our family to Florida for a few days to get away from it all. The storm had spared our home, but the recovery added big burdens to our professional lives, and the work exhausted us. A week in Orlando with our two small children proved good medicine.

Our visit reminded me of other times when Florida renewed my spirit. When I lost my father as a teenager, going to Pensacola eased my grief. I brought back a few seashells as souvenirs, and the sound they made when cupped to my ear seemed like the voice of nature itself, intimate and inexhaustible.

That faith in the affirming power of creation is being tested today as parts of Florida lie in ruins. In the wake of Hurricane Irma, a state celebrated as a source of sun, solace and sanctuary for millions of visitors has become a wellspring of worry and grief.

It’s a contradiction that has always rested at the heart of Florida’s identity, as I concluded every time we brought our son and daughter to one of the state’s sugar-white beaches. Our march to the shore touched me with an odd mix of delight and danger. I knew that the same sea soothing our senses could, in an unguarded moment, swallow us whole. We saw that dark side this week, as an Atlantic angered by furious winds menaced the homes of those who had welcomed the ocean as a neighbor.

The fragile balance between beauty and destruction informs coastal life around the globe. As the naturalist Loren Eiseley observed many years ago, those who come to the coast are not only resigned to its risks, but perhaps, on some intuitive level, also drawn to them. “Every time we walk along a beach,” he wrote, “some ancient urge disturbs us so we find ourselves shedding our shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.”

This has been a grim season for the United States Gulf Coast. My hometown, Baton Rouge, lies sandwiched between sadness, with a Harvey-hammered Texas to our west and an Irma-battered Florida to our east. Louisiana is still recovering from an epic flood that anguished thousands last year.

Such struggles renew a question those of us in coastal states often hear. If life near the water includes such threats, why live there are at all? There are a hundred practical answers, including the need to carry on the crucial work of the sea: harvesting its fisheries and energy, operating its ports, curating its wonders for tourists to enjoy.

But maybe it’s also important to remember that America began as a coastal community. The ocean, both its promise and peril, is written into our cultural DNA.

I thought about that this month as the TV weather map showed Florida in the bull’s eye of a meteorological monster. The state’s location in the Lower 48 is unmistakable — that slender peninsula at the bottom of the country, extended like the finger of some mythic Michelangelo figure reaching to touch the ineffable.

Like any land defined by coasts, Florida shows its face to the world, which is why it’s both so vital and vulnerable. As Hurricane Irma recedes, the world can repay the favor by rooting for the state’s recovery.

Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Advocate newspaper in Louisiana, is the author of “A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.”